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Growth in Microsoft's online-software business helped push the company's shares to a five-year high on Thursday. "At a time when we are going through a soft spot for enterprise IT spending, Microsoft seems to be gaining a bit of IT share, and I think that's what investors are latching onto now," said Brad Slingerlend, manager of the Janus Global Technology Fund.

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Leading technology companies have signed on with the U.K.-based IT training group E-Skills to begin offering apprenticeships in cybersecurity in an effort to address the industry's talent gap. The two-year apprenticeships -- which will be offered by IBM, BT, QinetiQ, Cassidian, CREST and Atos and are expected to draw as many as 300 applicants -- will train participants in three areas of expertise: security specialist, penetration tester and security architect.

In a quest to further engage with resellers, managed-services providers and other partners, the software-testing services company SOASTA has launched PERFORM, which aims to give mobile- and cloud-software developers an easier way to directly integrate testing solutions into third-party products.

Qualcomm believes it is time for enterprises to truly embrace the cloud and software-as-a-service technology, and the company has had its hand in both markets from the early stages, Chief Information Officer Norm Fjeldheim says. "Cloud is a positive force and I think it's a big change for the industry -- if I were Oracle or SAP, I'd be really worried," Fjeldheim said.

After coming under fierce criticism from trade groups, Mozilla announced it will postpone implementation of a default cookie-blocking capability in the forthcoming version 22 of the Firefox browser. The company said it will use the delay "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."

"People analytics" is the new frontier in Big Data applications, Ben Waber writes. "Today, people analytics is poised for a revolution, and the catalyst is the explosion of hard data about our behavior at work," Waber writes. "... This information can be a threat to personal privacy, so it's important to use data-gathering technology on an opt-in basis with the understanding that participants will be anonymous and no individual data will be disseminated."